How The Residential Real Estate Industry Can Appeal To Its Largest Demographic: Millennials

Are you there, Real Estate Industry? It’s us, Millennials. It’s a question that many who find themselves included in the broad group known as millennials have asked of late. Why has purchasing a home become so difficult, and why does the residential real estate industry seem so hesitant to make changes that will appeal to the largest single generation of homebuyers (around 80 million) to ever exist?

A blog post on Rethink’s (a real estate CRM and business management software company) website titled “An Open letter from Millennials to the Real Estate Industry” explores the ways real estate brands, agencies, and agents can appeal to and make the home buying process easier for the vast pool of millennials currently looking to purchase a home, which, in turn, incentivize more to take the plunge into the biggest investment of their lives.

Millennials have lived in a digital world for the majority of their lives. Bound encyclopedias have become the new rotary phones and turntables. Pointing a millennial in the direction of a stack of books when they have a question, for better or worse, will likely elicit a look of consternation typically reserved for trying to understand the plot of Lost (if you don’t understand the reference, there’s a good chance you aren’t part of the millennial generation). It follows, then, that when it comes to paperwork, the more of it that is digitized, the less intimidating it is going to be for a millennial. To millennials, mountains of paperwork are metaphorical illustrations representing the overworked American typically reserved for and represented in political cartoons and Dilbert comics, surely they aren’t real things. The less physical paperwork, the better.

Millennials also love creativity; it’s that startup mentality, using technology and other recent innovations to come up with a new why-didn’t-I-think-of-that product or service is valued by millennials. Therefore, using some of these new products or services, such as Air BnB or Home Away as a tool to allow people to ‘test drive’ a house may seem crazy, but it will speak to millennials in a way that a simple email listing never could.

As the blog post states, what it boils down to is millennials want the same basic things from a first home; stability, safety, and a solid financial investment. But what needs to differ from previous generations is how these principles are presented to millennial buyers.